1615 Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone

Today we’re talking about the benefits of moving out of your comfort zone, and how doing things that we’ve never done before, or things that maybe scare us a little bit or make us feel uncomfortable – things that stretch us a bit – how doing stuff like that can actually be good for us and make us more productive and more likely to achieve our goals and build our dreams.

Without a willingness to push through that fear and stretch ourselves out of our comfort zones, what happens is that when the big opportunities that could catapult us towards our greatest success actually show up for us, they seem so overwhelmingly frightening that we fail to take advantage of them. And then usually, we end up regretting the path not taken and berating ourselves for missing out on a golden opportunity.

#1: It becomes a habit.

When you start making a point to regularly do things that are a little bit outside of your current comfort zone, it starts to become a habit that you then continue to keep doing. You condition yourself to view your fear as just something else to work through, so you get used to just doing it without getting overwhelmed and backing away from those golden, but scary, opportunities.

When we get too complacent about staying put in our comfort zones and stop challenging ourselves, when we fall into that trap of minimum output – we lose our edge. We lose our ambition to do new things, and start looking for excuses to stay in the comfort zone. This is kind of a corollary to point number one about habits – just as you can create a habit of pushing your boundaries, when you never venture out of your little safe zone, you can create a habit of stagnating in your life.

#2: It increases your adaptability.

By constantly doing the things you once thought you couldn’t, you start to realize that you are more capable than you maybe gave yourself credit for. When things work the way you wanted them to, you realize how much you really are able to do, and when things don’t work out the way you wanted them to, you realize that you still manage to land on your feet and keep going. In essence, you realize that just because something scares you, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad thing, and this helps you to be better able to “ride the currents of change” when life throws unexpected curve balls at you.

#3: It increases your stamina.

The more you push yourself by moving out of your comfort zone, the easier it gets. Your comfort zone expands as your experience does, so as you keep pushing that boundary, you find that what would have scared you in the past no longer has the same anxiety-inducing power. You become more confident in your own abilities and you’re better able to handle new fears as they surface.

#4: It inspires creativity.

Expanding your comfort zone exposes you to new and different things. And novelty has a way of kick-starting your creative muse by creating new pathways in your brain and shifting your perspective on things to include this new experience. In short, it wakes up those neural pathways, challenges your preconceived notions of how things work, and inspires you to see things in a different way.

#5: It increases your productivity.

Doing new and different things has a way of energizing us. We get that adrenalin kick going and we tend to get hyper-focused on what we’re doing. That often has a spillover effect into other areas of our lives and results increased productivity, even when we’re not doing the new thing.

Summing it up

So let’s recap those benefits of moving out of your comfort zone really quickly here. By regularly pushing your boundaries and stepping outside of your comfort zone you will 1) make bravery a habit; 2) increase your ability to adapt to shifting circumstances; 3) increase your stamina and actually expand your safe zone, so that what would have scared you in the past no longer causes you anxiety; 4) increase your ability to think creatively and solve problems; and 5) you will become more productive in all areas of your life as the energy of new things fires you up.

Remember that sometimes it’s those very things that scare us most that will give us the biggest boost in progress towards getting to where we want to be. If you’ve got a big dream that you want to build in life, a willingness to do scary things – to “feel the fear and do it anyway” as Susan Jeffers famously said – is critical to your being able to turn that dream into reality.